Over the past few days, there has been a somewhat noticeable Twitter conflagration (when isn’t there?) over a tweet sent out by the Paris-based writer Thomas Chatterton Williams. The author most recently of Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, Chatterton Williams is someone with whom I have been relatively friendly (I interviewed him for a podcast last year). If you want to read anything by him, I suggest the piece in The New Yorker, The French Origins of “You Will Not Replace Us”.

The conflagration basically has to do with the fact that many American religious conservatives  objected to Chatterton Williams evincing a disrespectful attitude toward prayer. Rod Dreher, again, someone with whom I have been friendly, posted Christian Coronavirus Scapegoats on his blog and attacked the tweet. Dreher refers to Chatterton Williams as a “Blue Chekist.” It is a pedantic point, but Rod, not Thomas, actually has the blue check. But we all know what Rod meant, at least if we’re on Twitter. The “blue check” in a symbolic sense is the smug descendent of mid-2000s Jon Stewart. Generally, they have a preoccupation with “social justice,” and are embedded in the New York to D.C. media culture. The “blue check” is Lauren Duca.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is none of these things.  Rather, I think it’s defensible to describe him as an “IDW-adjacent” figure. Basically, a conventional late 20th-century liberal. As such, he takes a skeptical attitude toward conservative religion. In particular, toward conservative evangelical Protestantism, which is viewed as regressive and apocalyptic by 20th-century liberals. Recall Richard Dawkins’ interview of Ted Haggard in 2006 to get a sense.

With a serious world-wide pandemic coming toward us, I assume that many people of Thomas Chatterton Williams’ milieu were alarmed when they saw a photograph of Mike Pence leading the team tasked to respond to the pandemic praying. As the kids would say, “it’s not a good look.” The image was pregnant with many connotations.

Rod Dreher is not the only person who responded very negatively to the above tweet. I actually initially saw it via another conservative writer I follow. We can set aside the political opportunism of figures like Jeff Sessions. I think it is clear that many people were sincerely offended. Where the secular person might see a useless gesture at best, and a sinister one at worst, religious conservatives see normal, banal, and conventional behavior. For them, the act of prayer is a conventional part of daily life. It is not surprising they would be offended and angered that actions which they know to be in good will, and meritorious, were seen in a negative light.

The conflict between the secular intellectual and religious traditionalists is old in the modern West. It goes back a century at least, and conflicts are over substantive disagreements about the nature of the universe, and what that entails about the good life. But this is not truly the conflict that I believe religious conservatives are reacting to. Thomas Chatterton Williams’ tweet, which reflected late 20th-century tensions, was sucked into the undertow of 21st-century culture wars.

Though the blue checks may espouse secularism, their contempt and distrust toward religion has little to do with the metaphysical claims of religion, and all to do with the reality that they are presenting an alternative Weltanschauung to that of the religious conservative. They aim to replace religious morality with their own strident ethos. Whereas someone such as Richard Dawkins fixated on asking obnoxious questions dripping with acid contempt, the new cultural Left aims to revolutionize our understanding of what is good, right, and true, in a deeper manner. Dawkins himself is for this reason in bad odor with this set, because he still seems to prize thinking things through before agreeing to what the Ummah proposes.

In a dualistic form of Zoroastrianism, there is an evil spirit, Angra Mainyu, who is the enemy of God. The nature of this spirit is the inversion of God, as the two serve as a sort of balance. Someone like Thomas Chatterton Williams is somewhat outside of the dualism of the contemporary Western culture war. He is broadly liberal, but he is also skeptical of Ta-Nehisi Coates.  He is an unbeliever in both regnant cults. Nevertheless, the above tweet was caught in the slipstream of the dualistic culture war. To some extent, we’re all drafted into this duality.

The conflict before us comes to us, even if we don’t seek it.